Episode Details

Nick Lichtenberg did me an extraordinary kindness in Fortune this week. In a piece called “AI Just Gave You Six Extra Hours Back. Your Boss Already Took Them,” he quoted a plant manager from Ohio alongside Google directors, McKinsey partners, the chair of KPMG, and Baroness Dambisa Moyo of the House of Lords. I want to honor that generosity by doing what any good frontline worker does when someone hands them an opening — walk through it and get to work.

Nick assembled a magnificent chorus of voices all circling the same question: artificial intelligence is compressing tasks that once took days into minutes, so what happens to the hours that are left? A two-week audit at AES is now done in sixty minutes. Fifty percent of Google’s code is written by AI. A KPMG partner’s meeting prep dropped by seventy-five percent. The Dun & Bradstreet CTO, Mike Manos, put it with admirable candor: “I got the eight hours to two hours, but now I can get twenty hours of work.”

Every answer in the piece is about speed. I want to offer an answer about sight.

The Word That Caught Me

Manos used the phrase “widening aperture” to describe what AI makes possible — more problems to solve, more projects to chase, a bigger version of the job. It’s a photographer’s word. An aperture is the opening in a lens that determines how much light gets in, and therefore how much of the world the camera can see.

Manos means throughput. More light, more volume, more work crammed through the pipe.

But there is another way to read that word. What if the aperture that needs widening isn’t the workload? What if it’s the worker’s field of vision?

This is what I have spent thirty-six years studying, from General Motors to Royal Enfield to the corrugated pipe factory I run today in Wooster, Ohio. The single most consequential decision any company makes is not which technology to deploy. It is how much of the business it allows the frontline employee to see.

Three Openings

When I talk about widening the aperture for the frontline employee, I mean three specific expansions of sight. Not metaphors. Architecture.

First, see the whole business. Not just your station, your cell, your eight-foot stretch of the line — but the system. How the product reaches the customer. How the order triggers the production run. How quality at your hands becomes reputation in the market. In most American manufacturing plants, this view is systematically withheld. The worker is given a task, a rate, a shift. The aperture is kept narrow by design.

Second, see how money is made. Most plant workers have never seen a P&L. They have never been told what margin means, what their line contributes to revenue, what scrap actually costs in dollars the company will never recover. Open this aperture and suddenly the worker isn’t a pair of hands. They are an economic actor who understands the consequences of their own judgment.

Third, see your own reward. Not a generic bonus. Not profit-sharing that feels like weather — good years, bad years, who knows why. A fixed base that says we value your presence — and a variable component, above that base, that says we will pay you what you’re worth. Worth measured not in hours logged or widgets counted, but in Capability Capital: the deployed intelligence, judgment, and problem-solving that only a human being with a wide aperture can deliver. The variable line runs directly from “I saw this problem, I applied my intelligence, I solved it” to “here is what that was worth to the enterprise.” That is getting paid what you’re worth — and worth is measured in the capability you bring, not the time you spend.

When all three apertures are open — when the worker sees the business, understands the economics, and can trace their variable reward back to their own deployed Capability Capital — s